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Marty Appel's New Book
Proves Irresistible Reading
By MAURY ALLEN
of TheColumnists.com
MARTY APPEL, former publicity
director of the New York Yankees, was sitting around one evening
in 1999 with old Yankee pal Yogi Berra as Joe DiMaggio lay dying
in Florida.
Appel was listening to Yogi talk about what a great player DiMaggio
was and how much he enjoyed playing with him from 1947 through
1951. Appel mentioned Marilyn Monroe.
“I had dinner with him and Marilyn in Florida once, during
spring training, “ Berra said.
“You did? With Marilyn? Yogi, I have to know every detail
about this. Tell me everything about that evening,” Appel
said.
“Well,” Yogi said, “you know how when you order
a shrimp cocktail they usually bring out four or five of them?
That night we got eight.”
Appel lays out dozens and dozens of these hilarious, intimate,
warm, wonderful stories in his 16th book, the recently published,
“Now Pitching for the Yankees: Spinning the News for Mickey,
Billy and George” (Total Sports Illustrated) in a most
rare intimate look at baseball’s most famous team from inside
their sanctum.
Appel started his career with the Yankees at age 19, answering
Mickey Mantle’s fan mail, stayed 10 years, moved through
jobs in Bowie Kuhn’s office and the Atlanta Olympic Committee,
opened his own PR business and stayed loyal and loving to the
Yankees forever.
Now he has a chance to look back and flesh out the memories and
the moments of Yankee history through the team’s ugliest
decade into its resurrection. Do you know the Yankees finished
tenth in 1966 just before Appel arrived and he wouldn’t
leave until they became the Yankees again with their first World
Series win in 15 years in 1977?
Appel’s book is about the best thing ever written by an
insider about outside the Yankee lines. It is not about home
runs and strikeouts, Hall of Fame hitters and knockdown pitchers.
It is about cocky players like Willie Randolph and Thurman Munson,
about cheap executives like Gabe Paul and Lee MacPhail, about
goofy pitchers such as Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich and drunken
bums like Mickey Mantle and Billy Martin.
It is about the megalomania of George Steinbrenner and the paranoia
of Billy Martin. If a 50 buck ticket gets you a good seat today
behind home plate for a look at Roger Clemens at his meanest
and Bernie Williams at his finest, just 25 bucks for this book
will get you in the movies with Mantle.
Appel described Mantle crying at the filming of “The Last
Picture Show,” a Peter Bogdanovich study of life in a small
Texas town.
“That reminded you of home?” Appel asked the bawling
Bomber.
“Hell, we even had a village idiot like that one,”
said Mantle, the pride of Commerce, Oklahoma.
At 52, at the top of his writing game, Appel can still roll back
the years for wonderful anecdotes about the young and the restless
among even current Yankees. Willie Randolph came to the Yankees
in 1976. He is the third base coach now under Joe Torre and heir
apparent to the managerial job if Torre ever gives it up.
Appel describes how the kid from Brooklyn, after 30 big league
games with Pittsburgh where he wore uniform number 30, wanted
that number with the Yankees. Clubhouse legend Pete Sheehy, who
went back in uniforms to Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, offered number
34. Mel Stottlemyre had worn number 30 and had been a World Series
star in 1964 and team pitching leader for a decade. It had been
unused out of respect to Stottlemyre’s Yankee standing.
Randolph insisted he didn’t know Stottlemyre’s name,
that no one had the uniform now and that he wore 30 in Pittsburgh
and wanted it in New York.
“Give it to him,” advised Appel, as any good PR man
would.
Take a look at the Yankees as they line up for their next World
Series picture. Pitching coach Stottlemyre wears 34 and Randolph
still hangs on to 30. Only an insider like Appel could make that
kind of gossip breathe.
There was an old sportswriting legend about Ty Cobb. Jack Mann
of New York’s Newsday was called to write Cobb’s obituary
when the game’s highest average hitter died in 1961.
Mann told his editor, “The only difference now is he is
a dead prick.”
The line stayed in my head and rose to the surface like a rescued
swimmer in 1979 when Yankee catcher Thurman Munson died at age
32 in a plane crash. You could count Munson’s friends among
the press on one finger.
Appel was his PR man, his pal and his biographer. He wrote a
damn good book about Thurman and portrayed him as a misunderstood
guy. Father problems, you know. Anyway, Appel became a carrier
of the Munson legend through the book and his activities with
a charity started in Munson’s name.
Appel moderated a memorial tribute to Munson at Yogi’s Museum,
August 2, 1999, the 20th anniversary of his death, caused in
John Kennedy style by flying a plane he really couldn’t
handle.
Louder cheers are never heard in the Stadium than when Munson’s
Yankee time is captured on the ball park’s huge screen.
Appel made it happen. He made Thurman Munson into a lovable guy.
You know what? A tear usually runs down my cheek when I watch
the damn thing and I hated the guy. Get inside Appel’s book
for a hundred laughs and just enough tears.
© 2001 by Maury Allen.
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